Krik? Krak! (17 page)

"We know people by their stories," Ma said to Caroline in the cab on the way home that night. "Gossip goes very far. Grace heard women gossip in the Mass behind us the other day, and you hear what they say about Haitian women who forget themselves when they come here. Value yourself."

"Yes, Ma," Caroline said, for once not putting up a fight.

I knew she wanted to stay and spend the night with Eric but she was sparing Ma.

"I can t accuse you of anything," Ma said. "You never call someone a thief unless you catch them stealing."

"I hear you, Ma," Caroline said, as though her mind were a thousand miles away.

When we got home, she waited for Ma to fall asleep, then called a car service and went back to Eric's. When I got up the next morning, Ma was standing over my bed.

"Did your sister leave for school early again?" she asked.

"Yes, Ma," I said. "Caroline is just like you. She sleeps a hair thread away from waking, and she rises with the roosters."

I mailed out the invitations for Caroline's wedding shower. We kept the list down to a bare minimum, just a few friends and Mrs. Ruiz. We invited none of Ma's friends from Saint Agnes because she told me that she would be ashamed to have them ask her the name of her daughter's fiancé and have her tongue trip, being unable to pronounce it.

"What's so hard about Eric Abrahams?" I asked her. "It's practically a Haitian name."

"But it isn't a Haitian name," she said. "The way I say it is not the way his parents intended for it to be said. I say it Haitian. It is not Haitian."

"People here pronounce our names wrong all the time."

"That is why I know the way I say his name is not how it is meant to be said."

"You better learn his name. Soon it will be your daughter's."

"That will never be my daughter's name," she said, "because it was not the way I intended her name to be said."

In the corner behind her bed, Caroline's boxes were getting full.

"Do you think Ma knows where I am those nights when I'm not here?" she asked.

"If she caught you going out the door, what could she do? It would be like an ant trying to stop a flood."

"It's not like I have no intention of getting married," she said.

"Maybe she understands."

That night, I dreamed of my father again. I was standing on top of a cliff, and he was leaning out of a helicopter trying to grab my hand. At times, the helicopter flew so low that it nearly knocked me off the cliff. My father began to climb down a plastic ladder hanging from the bottom of the helicopter. He was dangling precariously and I was terrified.

I couldn't see his face, but I was sure he was coming to rescue me from the top of that cliff. He was shouting loudly, calling out my name. He called me Gracina, my full Haitian name, not Grace, which is what I'm called here.

It was the first time in any of my dreams that my father had a voice. The same scratchy voice that he had when he was alive. I stretched my hands over my head to make it easier for him to reach me. Our fingers came closer with each swing of the helicopter. His fingertips nearly touched mine as I woke up.

When I was a little girl, there was a time that Caro-line and I were sleeping in the same bed with our parents because we had eaten beans for dinner and then slept on our backs, a combination that gives bad dreams. Even though she was in our parents' bed, Caroline woke up in the middle of the night, terrified. As she sobbed, Papa rocked her in the dark, trying to con-sole her. His face was the first one she saw when Ma turned on the light. Looking straight at Papa with dazed eyes, Caroline asked him, "Who are you?"

He said, "It's Papy."

"Papy who?" she asked.

"Your papy," he said.

"I don't have a papy," she said.

Then she jumped into Papa's arms and went right back to sleep.

My mother and father stayed up trying to figure out what made her say those things.

"Maybe she dreamt that you were gone and that she was sleeping with her husband, who was her only com-fort," Ma said to Papa.

"So young, she would dream this?" asked Papa.

"In dreams we travel the years," Ma had said.

Papa eventually went back to sleep, but Ma stayed up all night thinking.

The next day she went all the way to New Jersey to get Caroline fresh bones for a soup.

"So young she would dream this," Papa kept saying as he watched Caroline drink the soup. "So young. Just look at her, our child of the promised land, our New York child, the child who has never known Haiti."

I, on the other hand, was the first child, the one they called their "misery baby," the offspring of my parents' lean years. I was born to them at a time when they were living in a shantytown in Port-au-Prince and had nothing.

When I was a baby, my mother worried that I would die from colic and hunger. My father pulled heavy carts for pennies. My mother sold jugs of water from the public fountain, charcoal, and grilled peanuts to get us something to eat.

When I was born, they felt a sense of helplessness. What if the children kept coming like the millions of flies constantly buzzing around them? What would they do then? Papa would need to pull more carts. Ma would need to sell more water, more charcoal, more peanuts. They had to try to find a way to leave Haiti.

Papa got a visa by taking vows in a false marriage with a widow who was leaving Haiti to come to the United States. He gave her some money and she took our last name. A few years later, my father divorced the woman and sent for my mother and me. While my father was alive, this was something that Caroline and I were never supposed to know.

We decorated the living room for Caroline's shower. Pink streamers and balloons draped down from the ceiling with the words
Happy Shower
emblazoned on them.

Ma made some patties from ground beef and codfish. She called one of her friends from Saint Agnes to bake the shower cake cheap. We didn't tell her friend what the cake was for. Ma wrote Caroline's name and the date on it after it had been delivered. She scrubbed the whole house, just in case one of the strangers want-ed to use our bathroom. There wasn't a trace of dirt left on the wallpaper, the tiles, even the bathroom cabinets. If cleanliness is next to godliness, then whenever we had company my mother became a goddess.

Aside from Ma and me, there were only a few other people at the shower: four women from the junior high school where we taught and Mrs. Ruiz.

Ma acted like a waitress and served everyone as Caroline took center stage sitting on the loveseat that we designated the "shower chair." She was wearing one of her minidresses, a navy blue with a wide butterfly collar. We laid the presents in front of her to open, after she had guessed what was inside.

"Next a baby shower!" shouted Mrs. Ruiz in her heavy Spanish accent.

"Let's take one thing at a time," I said.

"Never too soon to start planning," Mrs. Ruiz said. "I promise to deliver the little one myself. Caroline, tell me now, what would you like, a girl or a boy?"

"Let's get through one shower first," Caroline said.

I followed Ma to the kitchen as she picked up yet another empty tray.

"Why don't you sit down for a while and let me serve?" I asked Ma as she put another batch of patties in the oven. She looked like she was going to cry.

When it was time to open the presents, Ma stayed in the kitchen while we all sat in a circle watching Caroline open her gifts.

She got a juicer, a portable step exerciser, and some other household appliances from the school-teachers. I gave her a traveling bag to take on her honeymoon.

Ma peeked through the doorway as we cooed over the appliances, suggesting romantic uses for them: breakfasts in bed, candlelight dinners, and the like. Ma pulled her head back quickly and went into the kitchen.

She was in the living room to serve the cake when the time came for it. While we ate, she gathered all of the boxes and the torn wrapping paper and took them to the trash bin outside.

She was at the door telling our guests good-bye as they left.

"Believe me, Mrs. Azile, I will deliver your first grand-child," Mrs. Ruiz told her as she was leaving.

"I am sorry about your son," I said to Mrs. Ruiz.

"Now why would you want to bring up a thing like that?" Mrs. Ruiz asked.

"Carmen, next time you come I will give you some of my bone soup," Ma said as Mrs. Ruiz left.

Ma gave me a harsh look as though I had stepped out of line in offering my belated condolences to Mrs. Ruiz.

"There are things that don't always need to be said," Ma told me.

Caroline packed her gifts before going to bed that night. The boxes were nearly full now.

We heard a knock on the door of our room as we changed for bed. It was Ma in her nightgown holding a gift-wrapped package in her hand. She glanced at Caroline's boxes in the corner, quickly handing Caro-line the present.

"It is very sweet of you to get me something," Caro-line said, kissing Ma on the cheek to say thank you.

"It's very nothing," Ma said, "very nothing at all."

Ma turned her face away as Caroline lifted the present out of the box. It was a black and gold silk teddy with a plunging neckline.